Bill Dunn considers and contests accounts of globalization and post-Fordism that see structural economic change in the late Twentieth-century as having fundamentally worsened the conditions and weakened the potential of labour. Including a comparative survey of restructuring in four major industries; automobiles, construction, microelectronics and finance, the book suggests the timing of change and its complex and contradictory nature undermine structural explanations of labour's situation. It redirects attention towards labour's political defeats and own institutional shortcomings.

This volume examines the possibilities and obstacles to transnational solidarity in a period of global restructuring. It brings together a range of international and transnational case studies, examining successful and failed transnational solidarity covering inter-trade union co-operation as well as co-operation between trade unions and social movements within the formal and informal economy, and the public and private sector.

Interrogating the New Economy is a collection of original essays investigating the New Economy and how changes ascribed to it have impacted labour relations, access to work, and, more generally, the social and cultural experiences of work in Canada. Based on years of participatory research, sector-specific studies, and quantitative and qualitative data collection, the work accounts for the ways in which the contemporary workplace has changed but also the extent to which older forms of work organization still remain. The collection begins with an overview of the key social and economic transformations that define the New Economy. It then illustrates these transformations through examples, including essays on wine tourism, the regeneration of mining communities, the place of student workers, and changes in the public service workplace. It also addresses unions and their responses to the restructuring of work, as well as other forms of resistance.

Emphasizing the social processes that underpin the global economy and demonstrating how the uneven effects of global economic integration impact upon actors this book also underlines the reciprocal effects that reconfigure the terrain of global accumulation.

Globalisation has put national labour movements under severe pressure, due to the increasing transnationalisation of production, with the production of many goods being organised across borders, and the informalisation of the economy. Through a range of case studies, this volume examines the possibilities and obstacles to transnational solidarity of labour in a period of global restructuring and changing global political economy. It brings together a range of international and transnational case studies, examining successful and failed transnational solidarity covering inter-trade union co-operation as well as co-operation between trade unions and social movements within the formal and informal economy, and the public and private sector. It is structured in six parts and examines: Globalisation and the new challenges for transnational solidarity Inter trade union co-operation across borders. The dynamics of co-operation between trade unions and social movements across borders, looking at developing and developed countries. The struggles to defend the public sector against private service providers. The possible ways forward towards transnational solidarity of formal and informal labour in the global economy. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of International Political Economy, International Relations, Industrial Relation, Globalisation, Geography and History.

This collection of papers examines key trends in the internationalisation of employment, drawing on the proceedings of an ILO conference held in Annecy, France in April 2005. The papers focus on three related issues: the impacts of trade and investment abroad, including the offshoring of production of goods and services, and effects on the winners and losers in terms of employment; adjustment methods for coping with the short and medium term problems related to the globalisation of employment; and the importance of international instruments to help ensure a level playing field in trade and promote development, drawing on established rights and international labour standards.

Chinese development is widely considered to be an example of successful developmental catch-up with double-digit growth rates year on year. Some even talk of an emerging power, which may in time replace the US as the global economy’s hegemon. And yet there is a dark underside to this ‘miracle’ in the form of workers’ long hours, low pay and lack of welfare benefits. Increasing levels of inequality have gone hand in hand with super exploitative working conditions. Nevertheless, Chinese workers have not simply accepted these conditions of super-exploitation; they have started to fight back. Set against the background of China’s integration into the global economy along uneven and combined development lines, this volume explores new forms of resistance by Chinese workers, be it through the state trade union All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) or through informal labour NGOs. It also analyses the links between Chinese formal and informal labour organisations, with labour organisations outside China. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Globalizations.

Part of the Critical Perspectives on Work and Employment series, this edited collection brings together contributions from leading international scholars to initiate an important dialogue between labour process analysis and scholarship on work in the Global South. This book characterises the forms of work and labour process that characterise globalising capitalism today and addresses core analytical concerns within Labour Process Theory and research on work in the South. It explores how a wide range of production relations in the Global South, ranging from formal to informal employment and self-employment, are embedded in wider social relations of gender, caste, religion and ethnicity, and are related to wider patterns of commodification and resistance. Drawing on cutting-edge research, the book's chapters consider a diverse range of working situations, covering migrant workers in the Middle East, commercial surrogacy work in India and cooperative garment workers in Argentina. In offering a novel reading of the political economy of work in the Global South and shedding light on lesser-considered fields of work and worker organization, this volume will provide new insights for making sense of the changing world of work for students, scholars, labour activists and practitioners alike.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license.Globalization has adversely affected working-class organization and mobilization, increasing inequality by redistribution upwards from labour to capital. However, workers around the world are challenging their increased exploitation by globalizing corporations. In developed countries, many unions are transforming themselves to confront employer power in ways more appropriate to contemporary circumstances; in developing countries, militant new labour movements are emerging. Drawing upon insights in anti-determinist Marxian perspectives, Verity Burgmann shows how working-class resistance is not futile, as protagonists of globalization often claim. She identifies eight characteristics of globalization harmful to workers and describes and analyses how they have responded collectively to these problems since 1990 and especially this century. With case studies from around the world, including Greece since 2008, she pays particular attention to new types of labour movement organization and mobilization that are not simply defensive reactions but are offensive and innovative responses that compel corporations or political institutions to change. Aging and less agile manifestations of the labour movement decline while new expressions of working-class organization and mobilization arise to better battle with corporate globalization. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of labour studies, globalization, political economy, Marxism and sociology of work.

This book provides a critical engagement between contending historical materialist approaches that have played a crucial role in shaping post-positivist International Relations theory. It analyzes globalization as a process of state formation and argues that its fate depends on the neo-liberal recomposition of labour relations. .